This invention relates to cigarette cartons, and particularly to an insert blank to reduce the lateral internal space within a carton. The insert blank may be attached to a carton blank and erected simultaneously with the carton blank by folding the carton blank by ordinary procedures, or separately erected and attached to a fully erected carton. As used herein, the term cigarette carton means a folded container of paperboard or the like used to hold a plurality, normally ten, of cigarette packages.
In the past, cigarettes have generally been made with standard circumferences of about 25 millimeters. More recently, thinner cigarettes of about 19 millimeters or less have increased in popularity due to changing consumer demand. When smaller circumference cigarettes are packaged in the usual quantity of twenty, the resulting package is smaller than a package of twenty standard size cigarettes. For example, a package containing two rows of ten smaller size cigarettes will have approximately the same width as a package containing twenty standard size cigarettes in the usual 7-6-7 configuration, but its thickness will be substantially less. If ten such packages of smaller size cigarettes are placed in a standard size cigarette carton in the usual five-by-two array, they will not occupy all of the lateral space within the carton. Hence, these smaller packages will move within the carton as the carton is transported and handled.
Such movement is undesirable because tax stamps, required by state laws, may not be properly applied to the cigarette packages in their altered lateral positions. Conventional tax marking machinery is designed to apply a tax stamp to each of the ten packages contained in the carton based on the packages being located at known positions within the carton. Virtually all tax marking machinery is designed to operate with standard size cartons in which each of the ten standard size packages is restrained to a fixed location within the relatively close-fitting carton. Although some movement of cigarette packages within the carton is acceptable, increasing lateral separation between the packages and the carton side walls, or between the paired packages, as the cigarette circumference decreases may result in unsatisfactory stamping reliability.
Although this problem could be solved by using smaller size cartons and new or modified tax marking machinery designed to operate on smaller size cartons, it is advantageous to continue to use standard carton dimensions and machinery. Hence, a means is required to restrict the lateral movement of smaller size packages placed in a standard size carton. Additionally, it is desirable to use the same carton blanks used with standard size cigarette packages and to erect cartons from those blanks by the same process, regardless of cigarette package size.